DSpace at VNU: Political space in Vietnam: a view from the 'rice-roots

To cite this article: Andrew Wells-Dang 2010: Political space in Vietnam: a view from the ‘rice-roots', The Pacific Review, 23:1, 93-112 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.108

Publisher: Routledge

Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

The Pacific Review

Publication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpre20

Political space in Vietnam: a view from the ‘rice-roots'

Andrew Wells-Dang aa

Department of Political Science and InternationalStudies, University of Birmingham, UK

Version of record first published: 18 Mar 2010

To cite this article: Andrew Wells-Dang (2010): Political space in Vietnam: a view from

the ‘rice-roots', The Pacific Review, 23:1, 93-112

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09512740903398355

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to

date The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources The publisher shall not be liablefor any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damageswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith or arising out of the use of this material

Political space in Vietnam: a view from the ‘rice-roots’

Andrew Wells-Dang

Abstract Single-party, authoritarian states such as Vietnam are frequentlycharacterised as having ‘closed’ political opportunity structures and ‘un-free’socio-political systems The validity of this observation depends, however, onthe viewer’s frame of reference Seen from the perspective of active citizens,Vietnamese political structures offer increasingly greater space for collective actionthan a state-centred institutional analysis would predict Episodes of contentiouspolitics surrounding land disputes and public parks during 2007 provide evidence

of the changing dynamics of participation in politics Actors involved in theseand similar campaigns are broadly optimistic about the future prospects for anopening of political space within the existing system These findings are contrastedwith international reports of violations of political rights and with the Vietnamesegovernment’s own efforts at legal reform Although signals remain mixed, to someextent Vietnam might be becoming a ‘rice-roots democracy’ in practice, whileremaining a single-party state The voices and experiences of civil society actorswill continue to shape opportunities and risks in the expansion of political space

Keywords Political space; Vietnam; land rights; contentious politics; civil society

Inter-and Southeast Asia in edited collections including Transborder Issues in the Greater Mekong

Sub-Region (Ubon Ratchathani, Thailand: Mekong Sub-region Social Research Center, 2008)

and Modernity and Re-Enchantment: Religion in Post-Revolutionary Vietnam (Singapore: stitute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007) as well as contributions to journals such as China

In-Review International, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy in Focus, and Asia Times.

Address: 1 ngo 7 Nguyen Hong, Hanoi, Vietnam E-mail: andrewwd@gmail.com

The Pacific Review

ISSN 0951-2748 print/ISSN 1470-1332 online
C 2010 Taylor & Francis

http://www.informaworld.com/journals DOI: 10.1080/09512740903398355

approval by city authorities to develop a plan to transform Hanoi’s largesturban park into a private, Disneyland-style theme park The story was cir-culated widely in the local state-controlled press and criticised on the Inter-net Local residents spoke out against the plans, which were portrayed ascorrupt and anti-poor Influential citizens, including respected retired offi-cials, editorialised against the agreement Faced with an upsurge of publicoutrage, the city government backed down in August 2007, putting the parkredevelopment plan on hold.

During the same period, local residents from at least five peri-urban areasaround Hanoi staged protests at the city People’s Committee or at centralgovernment offices such as the Ministry of Justice and National Assembly.The protesters called for an end to land-grabbing by speculators and faircompensation for local land seized for development purposes Police fol-lowed and negotiated with the protesters, ultimately forcing them to dis-band, but in most cases without using violence or making arrests Similardemonstrations took place in Ho Chi Minh City, some of them attended

by a proto-opposition group, Viet Tan, who attempted to link with theprotesters While many of the protests were ineffectual, some did achievetheir objectives

These ‘episodes of contentious politics’ (McAdam et al 2001) illustrate

a variety of new political spaces opening in present-day Vietnam Despiteongoing Communist Party control, the media is taking a more active role

as public watchdog on cases of corruption, environmental damage and landuse In particular, the Internet offers a new space for public discussion andcriticism that is less restricted than the print or broadcast media Internetuse is one example of the greater potential for overseas Vietnamese toadd a transnational element to domestic political discourse Within urbanVietnam, well-connected and respected individuals, such as intellectuals,artists and retired officials, feel greater freedom to speak out on public is-sues Poor and rural Vietnamese, meanwhile, may attempt to raise theirvoices through the Party-government system, but when these fail are in-creasingly resorting to public protest as a vehicle for expression

A common international presentation of Vietnam, as well as ing China and Laos, stresses far-reaching market economic reforms withoutany corresponding political change (Freedom House 2008; Human RightsWatch 2007) According to this view, any perceived openings in politicalspace are illusory or imagined as long as a single-party Communist regime is

neighbour-in power By contrast, other observers see evidence of a ‘fragile yet assertiveform of Vietnamese democratic practice’ in which ‘supposedly non-politicalactivities become transgressive events’ (Thomas 2001: 311) In fact, notall contention is necessarily anti-Party, and direct challenges to the single-party system remain taboo Within these limits, the formation of public col-lective action in Vietnam comprises an unexpected and under-appreciatedexpansion of political space over the past decade: unexpected, givenpreconceived ideas about political change in authoritarian systems, and

under-appreciated, due to limitations in state-centred or macro-level waysthat many analysts conceptualise and attempt to measure political space.

Approaches to defining political space: a review

As with related concepts such as ‘civil society’, ‘public sphere’, and ‘socialmovements’, there is no single accepted definition of political space A lit-eral definition taken from political geography would simply be the physicallocations where political activity takes place Public squares, memorials,universities, and government buildings are all public spaces that may bemore or less open to political expression A second category is virtual: themedia, academic discourse, and cyberspace Thus, political spaces are pluraland can be examined individually or relationally in linkages to each other

A danger inherent in the spatial definition is ‘the territorial trap’ of nalizing political boundaries, assuming that geographical or virtual politicalspaces are associated with the territorial state (Ferguson and Jones 2002).Legal boundaries do not always match with the mental maps that peopleconstruct in their heads This suggests an alternative definition of politicalspace as the sum of people’s perceptions of the range of political action andexpression that is open to them in a particular time and place One suchconstruction is the ‘power cube’ proposed by John Gaventa (2007: 206), inwhich space can be viewed as closed, invited, claimed and created A civilsociety might thus adopt a mix of strategies: to open (claim) closed spaces,utilise invited spaces, and/or create spaces that are autonomous of govern-ment or corporate control.1

inter-‘Expanding’ or ‘opening’ political space has obvious positive tions, echoing the opening of the Iron Curtain, as well as China’s process of

connota-‘reform and opening up’ (gaige kaifang) and Vietnam’s ‘renewal’ (doi moi).

Thus, ‘freedom is spatialized in metaphors of autonomy, as in lack of cal constraint to mobility’ (Dalby 2005) In a survey article on political space

physi-in Southeast Asia, Kevphysi-in Hewison (1999: 224) defphysi-ines expansion of cal space as ‘replac[ing] authoritarianism with more representative politicalregimes’ He contrasts Malaysia and Singapore as ‘illiberal’ or ‘Asian-style’approaches to political space and democratisation that are dominated byruling parties, with what were at the time emerging democracies in Thai-land and Indonesia Vietnam, reasonably, is classified as a ‘post-socialist au-thoritarian regime’ with ‘very limited openings for opposition perspectives’(1999: 224, 242) In this reading, political space is equated with (perceived)moves towards democracy, a public sphere and civil society

politi-Human rights organisations such as Freedom House (2008) offer ticular conceptions of the forms of political space that are required for apopulation to be considered ‘free’ These spaces consist of elections, macro-level politics, and legal systems, the key procedural arenas of liberal democ-racy Individual rights are the foundation of such a system; a civil society isonly possible when free, autonomous individuals assemble voluntarily out

of their own self-interest, forming an arena of social action separate fromthe state and the market (Cohen and Arato 1992: ix) Democratisation the-ory implies directionality to political change, with countries either ‘ahead’

or ‘behind’ in the (inevitable?) transition to the end point of full racy East Asian political reality, especially in recent years, looks a gooddeal more complex than that: in place of modernist views of developmentalong a linear trajectory, societies and agents within them are moving backand forth among a variety of alternative, overlapping political spaces

democ-A further difficulty with the democratisation approach is the deductionthat little to no political space can exist in authoritarian systems, since po-litical space is associated with democracy and opposition politics in the firstplace If these are the sole criteria, civil society and social movements can-not exist in Vietnam by definition, since the system is ‘un-free’; like humanrights, political space is something that ‘we’ in Western liberal democracieshave and ‘they’ do not (Goody 2002; Hann and Dunn 1996) This concep-tion is consistent with a definition of social movements as set repertoires

of collective action that are historically and culturally restricted to ern democracies (Col ´as 2002; Tilly 2004) and cannot be sustained in non-democratic contexts (Tilly and Tarrow 2006: 57) But while open spaces forpolitical expression may indeed be fewer or differently structured in author-itarian regimes, this does not preclude their existence Political space is notfully limited by the state nor always formally constituted in recognisable in-stitutions The political is also personal, and political space is nuanced andstructured variously for different groups and individuals In the ‘state-in-society perspective’ of Joel Migdal and colleagues (1994, 2001), ‘societiesaffect states as much or more than states affect societies’; even authoritar-ian states are embedded and inter-related to society writ large Since statesthemselves are social constructions (Finnemore 1996), they are thus contin-gent on other social actors, with blurry or fuzzy boundaries between stateand society, and relations that can be ‘mutually transforming’ (Kohli andShue 1994) This redefinition of state–society relations is essential for un-derstanding the dynamics of plural and intertwined political spaces wherethe state has historically been strong

West-Social movement theorists have contributed the useful idea that groups

in society act based on the ‘opportunity structures’ existing in their politicalenvironments Political opportunity structures, according to Sidney Tarrow(1998: 2), are ‘consistent dimensions of the political environment that pro-vide incentives for or constraints on people undertaking collective action’

In simple terms, social movement theory postulates that political space willexpand when the opportunities favouring the activities of social movementsand networks exceed the constraints placed on them This implies a com-plex set of relationships and interactions between social actors, and betweensocial actors and the state: from information sharing and strategizing toforming alliances, cooperating, confronting, and negotiating outcomes Po-litical space is created not only as a result of social action but also through

the process of citizens engaging the state, each other, and the market, along

a range of strategies from dialogue to advocacy to contention

Reunification Park: a case study of political space in practice

Hanoi’s Reunification Park (Cong vien Thong Nhat) is the largest green

space in the centre of the crowded Vietnamese capital Built by volunteerlabour in the 1960s and once named after Lenin, the park is popular withrich and poor alike who pay the equivalent of a few pence each to enter.The park facilities, managed by a state-owned company, are poorly main-tained, with shabby carnival rides and informal hawkers occupying much

of the open area at the park’s main entrance Several better-constructedplay areas were constructed by multinational corporations in 2001, whichraised eyebrows in the international media given the site’s association withLeninism (Hayton 2006) While it is not as well known to international vis-itors as the public spaces of Hoan Kiem Lake or Ba Dinh Square (Thomas2001: 308), the park’s commemoration of Reunification has symbolic polit-ical overtones of national unity and the end of the Vietnam War

In early 2007, following aborted attempts to renovate the park severalyears earlier, the Hanoi People’s Committee gave a green light for two pri-vate companies, Tan Hoang Minh and Vincom, to prepare a plan to pri-vatise the park and turn it into ‘a small-scale Disneyland’ (Phung Suong2007).2Details of the plan, including in-depth interviews with the companydirectors, were published in newspapers, particularly those managed by var-

ious branches of the Youth Union; these papers (Tuoi Tre and Tien Phong, along with Thanh Nien) are generally viewed as more independent than

other state-owned media However, the largest number of articles appeared

on news websites such as VietNamNet and dantri.com.vn.3 Although thecorporations insisted that redevelopment would serve the interests of allresidents of Hanoi, this was belied by descriptions of a planned five-levelunderground car park and shopping area, 3-D theatre and nightclub, as well

as the price tag of 1,500 billion dong – approximately £45 million (Dantri2007)

As news of the corporations’ plans spread, public discussion about fication Park turned to dismay and outcry A local architect, Hai Nguyen,was the first to put his misgivings online in mid-April (Vietnam StudiesGroup 2007) His polemic, ‘Let’s save the park! Let’s save our city!’ wasposted on a city issues website (http://dothi.net) Other statements soon ap-peared on blogs and websites, including at least one set up especially forthe purpose (www.savehanoipark.com) The mainstream media, which hadreported news of the redevelopment plans and given a mouthpiece to cor-porate leaders, did not pick up on the groundswell of public concern until

Reuni-later By May, the English-language Viet Nam News referred to ‘cries of

protest’ from Hanoi residents in an article that presented a neutral but fused picture of the debate (Thu Huong 2007)

The cause to stop the corporations’ plans was taken up by a network ofarchitects, retired government officials, journalists and bloggers Some ac-tivists, but by no means all, had existing professional connections to theHanoi city government or other authorities One prominent member of thisinformal network was retired city planner Tran Thanh Van, formerly anarchitect in the Ministry of Construction’s Institute of Rural and UrbanPlanning who had led a previous anti-corruption campaign in the ThangLong Water Park case in 2000 Ms Van’s postings on VietNamNet drewwidespread praise (and some criticism) from readers (VietNamNet 2007a,2007b) Similarly, a leading biologist from a government research institute,

Ha Dinh Duc, sent an angry letter to the state president that was postedonline (VietNamNet 2007c)

Both professionals and ordinary people combined environmental and litical appeals to stop the proposed redevelopment of Reunification Park.Access to the park for poor people was a common theme of online post-ings, even if the bloggers themselves may not have been very poor Con-cern about corporate involvement also surfaced repeatedly, but the largestsingle concern was losing the little remaining public space in central Hanoi,along with the trees which are ‘the lungs of the city’ (Trung Hieu 2007).While the physical space of the park was not co-terminus with the politicalspace to discuss its fate – no actual protest activities took place within thepark itself – activists made a clear connection between these various spacesand quality of life in the city By claiming Reunification Park as public prop-erty, contenders also asserted their right to speak for and as citizens of theVietnamese polity

po-By summer 2007, opposition to privatising the park had crystallised into

a public campaign On 3 August, leading academics and architects ised a conference, sponsored by the non-governmental organisation (NGO)HealthBridge (formerly PATH Canada), on the ‘System of Green PublicSpace in Hanoi’, issuing a call to ‘save green space in Hanoi’ which wasposted on the Internet Participants in the conference were interviewed

organ-by the state-owned media, which began posting large quantities of publiccomments about the controversy, split roughly 80 per cent to 20 per centagainst the corporations On 17 August, the Hanoi city government sus-pended the redevelopment plans (Doan Loan 2007), giving the campaign-ers at least a temporary victory and putting privatisation indefinitely onhold

The Reunification Park campaign is a clear example of a civil society work, defined here as the joining together of organisations and individuals

net-to influence power around a shared conception of the common good Inthis case, individual activists played key roles, using their contacts in themedia and government to advocate for a change in the city’s decision Inthe process, they engendered a public debate that involved hundreds if notthousands of Hanoians in reflection about the nature of development intheir city and the value of public space This debate highlights the mixed

role of the media in Vietnam (Heng 2004): ultimately state-controlled, yetwith certain freedom of movement, media both served city government andcorporate interests and also the purposes of activists at different times dur-ing the unfolding events Activists engaged in what Kevin O’Brien (2004:107) terms ‘boundary-spanning contention’, which ‘goes on partly withinthe state and hinges on the participation of state actors.’ Such a campaign

‘is not prescribed or forbidden, but tolerated (even encouraged) by someofficials, and not tolerated by others’

It is also worthwhile examining what the campaign was not It was not marily led by NGOs; these only entered the network towards the end of thecampaign International actors played only a minor role in publicising the is-sue and funding the August 2007 conference And none of the activists werepublicly anti-government or oppositional in their stances, though they were

pri-at times harshly critical of corporpri-ate and city stpri-atements about the park.Several outspoken critics were current or former government employees –

but, importantly, they were national government employees, not the city

government which was involved in the redevelopment plans When thesecritics spoke publicly about Reunification Park, they did so as residents ofHanoi with links to a different (and higher) level of government than theone directly responsible for administering the park Hanoi-based activistsmay have an advantage in this sense over other regions of Vietnam with lessaccess to central government and lower per-capita Party membership, butthe principle of engaging multiple levels of government holds nationwide.The activists’ stance points to the plural, fuzzy and contested nature of inter-action between civil society and various branches of the state and challengesdefinitions of civil society as non-governmental and fully autonomous.The Reunification Park campaign was the first such public effort in Viet-nam to have been conducted in a primarily virtual format.4 Without thepolitical space provided by the Internet, organisation of the ReunificationPark network would have been much harder Physical meetings would haverequired more logistical preparation and funding, plus the risk of confronta-tion or restrictions from authorities or corporate representatives Blogs al-lowed activists to post their concerns directly without passing through theofficial media, while websites such as VietNamNet were able to post moreinformation with fewer filters than print media As long as content wasnot perceived as anti-government – and the privatisation opponents lim-ited their critique to that single issue – the state did not attempt to censortheir expression Thus, participants in the campaign strategically used op-portunities in the available political space in order to spread their views andreach their objectives

Land protesters: between state and opposition

Most episodes of contentious politics in contemporary Vietnam are nected in some way with land issues, including ethnic minority land claims

and demarcation of the Chinese border During the revolutionary period,both northern and, after 1975, southern farmers sought various ways of re-sisting collectivisation of their lands (Kerkvliet 1995) The significant localuprisings in Thai Binh province in 1997 and in the Central Highlands in

2001 and 2004 revolved around taxation, corruption and land rights (Luong2005; UN High Commissioner for Refugees 2002) Even industrial strikes,which have increased dramatically in number over the past five years, areconnected to land issues, in that most strikes involve migrant workers whoface land pressures in their home villages (Wells-Dang 2005) In addition,many industrial parks outside major cities are built on previously agricul-tural land that has been expropriated from its original users

While no wide-ranging rural uprisings have taken place in the past eral years, localised episodes of land protest have become a common fea-ture of the Vietnamese landscape Protests against the development of golfcourses, for instance, have occurred repeatedly outside Hanoi and Ho ChiMinh City (BBC 2004; Thai Doan 2008); like theme parks, golf courses arehighly unequal and exclusionary forms of land use Land in the periphery ofmajor cities is extremely valuable for development, but when land is seized

sev-by the government, peasants are typically compensated only for the cultural value of the land, not its market value Similar processes in China,where land rights are less protected than in Vietnam, have sparked hun-dreds of thousands of local protests (O’Brien and Li 2006) Unlike the Re-unification Park dispute over public space, many rural protests are primarilyconcerned with the uses and values of space for economic production, landthat is legally owned by the state but allocated to households for their ownuse

agri-Rural and peri-urban residents who do not receive adequate land pensation in their local areas increasingly travel en masse to large cities andpress their cases there In 2007–8, several dozen such demonstrations occu-pied the pavement and sometimes blocked streets in front of the Hanoi citygovernment, National Assembly offices, and the Ministry of Justice Num-bers ranged from about 30 to several hundred people, and demonstrationslasted an average of two or three days, with participants sleeping on site.Police, both uniformed and plain-clothes, were always present, but usually

com-at a distance Some protesters carried signs or banners, which may be seized

by police Most recent demonstrations have been peaceful, with one allegedself-immolation since 2005 (Reuters 2007) Police and demonstrators nego-tiate an end to the sit-ins, allowing the protesters to return home unharmed,but no information is available to determine how many demonstrations at-tain their aims

A particularly large and extended land demonstration occurred in Ho ChiMinh City in July 2007 Hundreds of farmers from seven southern provincesconverged on the city to protest expropriation of their land by local officials;they occupied a major downtown street for 27 days, attracting local andinternational press attention In the end, exhausted, the demonstrators put

up no resistance when police cleared the area and told them to return home(Deutsche Presse Agentur 2007).

Unusually, the Ho Chi Minh City demonstration also attracted ers from an overseas-based opposition group, the Viet Tan Party Articulate

support-Viet Tan members used their website and underground radio station (Chan

Troi Moi or ‘New Horizon’) to publicise the demonstration while also

draw-ing attention to their own cause The Vietnamese government considersViet Tan a terrorist group, although none of the group members appear

to have been involved in any armed activity for decades, if ever (AgenceFrance Presse 2007) On the other hand, there is no evidence that the south-ern demonstrators themselves had any involvement or support for Viet Tan;the more likely explanation is that Viet Tan members, sensing a chance tohitch their cause to the largest demonstration in Ho Chi Minh City for years,attempted to take advantage of the political opportunity Viet Tan’s pres-ence, as well as the participation of the Buddhist opposition leader ThichQuang Do, probably did little to help the demonstrators’ cause Rather thandemonstrators using media and overseas groups to advance their interests,

it seems more likely that the media and Viet Tan used them Some analystshave identified Viet Tan as a driving force behind present and future civilsociety activism (Thayer 2008: 10), while others see external political groups

as extraneous actors in a system in which change is more likely to arise fromwithin (Heng 2004)

Most land protests do not attract such international media coverage

or high-level political attention Urban ethnographer Nguyen Vu Hoang(2007) conducted fieldwork in an outer district of Hanoi which is a site ofmajor construction and road-building, examining cases of one neighbour-hood threatened by demolition and another street where residents wereunder-compensated for their houses seized for a road-widening project Inthe first neighbourhood, residents signed petitions, held meetings and sit-ins They also reached out to a nearby district where residents had held off

a construction project for several years and demanded greater tion.5In the process, the residents discovered a map that was different fromthe construction plans that had been shown to them by local officials Aftermuch effort, they were eventually able to bring this to the attention of thecity government, who overruled the district authorities’ decision and savedthe neighbourhood from demolition, at least for the time being

compensa-The core of this neighbourhood’s campaign strategy lay in their creativeuse of the state machinery against itself, joining with part of the state inorder to press a claim from another part The neighbourhood CommunistParty cell leader, in fact, became the spokesperson and de facto leader

of the group A retired state enterprise director, he was educated, connected and respected by everyone in the neighbourhood On the nearbystreet that was due for widening, the residents’ group became led by anactive-duty policeman, who as a current government employee had access

well-to more information than the retired Party cell leader (Nguyen 2007) Use